With a high dirty ratio and occupancy, OCF might unable to map cache lines
for new requests, thus pass-through the I/O to core devices. IOPS will
drop afterwards. We need to control the dirty ratio.
Existing `alru' policy gives user the chance to control the stale buffer
time, activity threshold etc. They can affect the dirty ratio of the cache
device, but in an empirical manner, more or less. Introducing
`max_dirty_ratio' can make it explicit.
At first glance, it might be better to implement a dedicated cleaner policy
directly targeting dirty ratio goal, so that the `alru' parameters remains
orthogonal. But one the other hand, we still need to flush dirty cache
lines periodically, instead of just keeping a watermark of dirty ratio.
It indicates that existing `alru' parameters are still required if we
develop a new policy, and it seems reasonable to make it a parameter.
To sum up, this patch does the following:
- added a 'max_dirty_ratio' parameter with default value 100;
- with default value 100, `alru' cleaner is identical to what is was;
- with value N less than 100, the cleaner (when waken up) will active
brought dirty ratio to N, regardless of staleness time.
Signed-off-by: David Lee <live4thee@gmail.com>
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